Meta

So, do you really think Twitter is digging its own grave, lately, what with the alienating of the 3rd-party-client-loving nerds lately? Interesting. Hmm.

What? No, actually, I deleted my Facebook account (for the second time), a couple weeks ago. Let’s face it: for an introvert, that site is worse than dentistry.

But, so, this? Just passing through.

You look good, though. Real good.

Also, did you know a whole lot of Dreamhost sites had recently been hacked to add subtle advertisements on page footers? I didn’t. Should you be a similar cheapskate hosting-wise, then finding files named 403.php and links.db should make you suspicious with a quickness.

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said “Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing – is this true?” Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, “Foolish pupil – objects are merely a poor man’s closures.”

Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

So dchud demonstrated the right way to publish the list of shows you’ve seen, which I’d been dwelling on since Genie hit me on That Site I Hate with the recent meme.

Now I regret not having kept better track of dates and venues, and I wonder what shows I’ve forgotten altogether. Stream-of-consciousness order, not chronological or priority, wheat and chaff alike. Nothing I don’t remember seeing (and hopefully nothing I remember but didn’t actually see).

So after half-a-year being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the cross-country move and by life with the two small excellent tyrants we brought with us, I’m trying to be more civilized again, which means, y’know, communicating with humans. As I mentioned a bit ago, I’m pro-Twitter; Facebook, on the other hand, I well and truly hate in the special lathered way that nerds can loathe technology that offends us by failing at the things we care about most. [I’m convinced that this strain of nerd-hate for badly designed things is the source of most or all great inventions, but I’ll talk about that some other time.]

For whatever reason, two analogies that occur to me regularly are:

Facebook : Extroverts :: Twitter : Introverts

and

Facebook : Windows :: Twitter : Unix

The former analogy is driven by the one-way nature of Twitter following and the simplicity of their model, which put so much less burden on the target of one’s interest than the seventeen infuriating ways that Facebook flaps its annoyances in your face when somebody decides to enter your sphere.

The latter analogy is less complete, and driven mainly by my complete inability to grasp what the hell Facebook is actually supposed to be offering me at any time; it seems directly patterned after the typical Windows model of endless gray dialog boxes, each offering slightly different permutations of a subset of whatever you think you’re trying to do, and now with an extra layer of whooshy visual noise slathered all over it. FB doesn’t get within a time zone of “do one thing, and do it well”; it’s a weird walled-garden mockery of the real Internet, a joyless replica of AOL and Prodigy and all the other obsoleted competitors.

I can’t completely defend my irrational and entire loathing for the FB. God knows I haven’t ultimately spent that much time trying to navigate its baffling cryptic shit-pile of an interface (though, god also knows, it’s been more than enough), and I’ll grant that maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But I’m sticking to my guns in re: hating it, despite having re-activated my account today (killed in a fit of biliousness a few months back) because people I like joined up. The awful creepy targeted ads; the dozens of insultingly moronic ‘applications’ constantly fapped in my face (how many god-damned quizzes can you people do in a given day?); the grotesquely disingenous combination of blocking useful information before ‘friending’ but burying you in infinite inane detail post-‘friend’ing… how the christ did these half-wits end up winning the social network sweepstakes and a license to print money, when so many other crap sites have failed tracelessly?

So: why not join twitter? The barrier is very low; it just doesn’t demand a lot of you before you can start flinging quickie aphorisms at me (by web browser, or various small client programs, or from SMS or iPhone apps). Think of it as a micro-blog, or as a group instant messaging session that’s asynchronous and particularly easy to involve others in. You can just say stuff; I’ll be listening at @aboyko.

Nevermind the hypocrisy/absurdity of writing 500 words on this stupid topic, never you mind it a bit.

People I worked with at the Library of Congress will recall that I ran around, during the last week of May, babbling “andy at boyko dot net” to anyone who would listen. The sad fact is, in the few months since that episode, I have been almost totally incapable of answering emails to that address, for various reasons, some good, some not. I’m on the verge of declaring email bankruptcy.

For some inexplicable reason, though, Twitter is working for me. Maybe it’s the rugged good looks of Twitterriffic that keep me coming back; more likely, it’s the fact that I’m forced to actually keep it short, unlike the emails I tend to inflict on people once I get going.

So anyhow, yeah, sorry I’ve been incommunicado; let’s chalk it up to technical difficulties, and start over via IM and Twitter.

Every now and again I find myself wanting to read an ext2/ext3-formatted disk from a Linux box on a Mac. Once there was an OS X kernel module that sort of worked, in the sense that it often would mount an ext2 disk on OS X successfully, but the years have not been kind to it, and at this point it’s mainly good for being the only way I know to induce a kernel panic on Leopard.

Happily, though, we live in a weird sort of future where a surprisingly effective way to solve the problem is to run a Linux virtual machine (say, Ubuntu 8.04) on your Mac, and hand it the USB drive with the Linux filesystem. Being a cheapskate, and having no other real VM needs at the moment, I just downloaded Sun’s free VirtualBox (rather than VMWare or Parallels) and grabbed the current Ubuntu ISO. The only trick at all to mounting an external USB2 drive in the VM was to grant the VM access to the USB device by creating a “USB Device Filter”:

which must be done while the drive is connected, but while the VM is not booted. (When you plug in the drive, Mac OS X will complain about the Linux drive being unreadable and offer to format it, but pay it no mind, and tell it to ignore the problem).

I think I’m entirely over my initial reaction, which was that this approach must be Worse somehow than using the unstable & unmaintained ext2fsx kernel module to achieve the “same” result with less code (and also not working). Yes, this VM approach uses more moving parts, but with the advantage of running the actual filesystem in its original context (i.e. with some presumption of correctness), with the only particular risk being added by whatever trickery is needed to pass USB through to the VM.

My kid’s taking it to the next level, as far as tracking his reading habits on GoodReads. All the typing of book titles was boring the young lad, though, and so we just dropped just under fifteen bucks on eBay, shipped, for one of them CueCat USB barcode scanners. You may remember that name attached to an intellectual property brou-ha-ha a couple years back, since the gadgets were part of some sort of scammy spyware company’s get-rich-quick-through-encrypted-barcode-scanning scheme that, astonishingly, didn’t pan out, round about the same time people realized you could trivially hack them to be more generally usable.

Anyhow, turns out there were a zillion of the gadgets made, and apparently after the company went under, you could buy a lot of 500,000 @ $0.30 or something. Some fine enterprising dude on eBay bought a batch, hacks them so they’re fully decrypted, and sells ’em steadily for under $10 plus shipping. Based on our experience so far, if you’re in the business of adding big piles of books to GoodReads or LibraryThing or what-have-you, or you have a five-year-old who is, you could do worse.

But so now my kid is constantly dragging stacks of books over to the computer, plugging in the scanner, and pulling in the ISBNs. I figure in another decade the kid will be so good at wanding barcodes that he’ll rise to the top of the retail job heap and be crowned King Of The Mall before he’s 17. I’ll be so proud, I might get a t-shirt made.

It’s possible that the availability of an iphone client for WordPress will make me more likely to write here, in the same way that the availability of a saw in my garage will make me likely to build an armoire. Still, how can l keep from trying it?